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LibreOffice 4.1's first release candidate arrives

The arrival of the next version of LibreOffice nears with the publication of the first release candidate for LibreOffice 4.1. The LibreOffice developers released the RC1 with release notes listing 61 bugs fixed since Beta 2's publication two weeks ago, with various fixes for the experimental sidebar, OOXML conversion fixes for crashes and border width reading, some fixes to rendering and runaway lines reverted, and corrections for various crashes in Writer, Base and the document converter.

This is the first of three release candidates scheduled between now and 22 July when the final release of LibreOffice 4.1 should take place. Release candidate status means that no new features will now be added to the application and the focus will be entirely on fixing bugs and polishing the code for final release. LibreOffice 4.1's new feature list includes support for embedded fonts in Writer, Impress and Calc, image rotation in writer, a toggleable comments bar, more functions supported in Calc for better Excel and ODF OpenFormula compatibility, and new query limits and properties in Base.

Also, thanks to the integration of libmwaw, LibreOffice 4.1 will be able to handle legacy Mac formats from pre-Mac OS X applications such as Microsoft Word for Mac 5.1, Write Now 4.0, MacWrite Pro 1.5 and AppleWorks 6.0. There are also performance improvements such as deferred label processing; the developers also note that they made improvements in version 4.0 such as asynchronous word count, faster large RTF document import and hashed auto-correction, but did not announce these features at the time.

LibreOffice 4.1.0 RC1 is available from the LibreOffice Download QA Builds page. As with all pre-release builds, it is not recommended for "mission critical" work. Potential testers should consult the QA Testers page for details of how to check for and report bugs.